Kosovo Parliament Urged To Probe Former Secret Agency

 Florin Krasniqi, member of the Kosovo Parliament from the Vetevendosje party

Πηγή: Balkan Insight
By Fatmir Aliu
March 30 2012

An opposition Self-Determination MP has started gathering signatures to get parliament to fully investigate the workings of the ruling party's former secret agency.

Self-determination (Vetevendosje) Movement MP Florin Krasniqi presented the request on Wednesday to parliament, saying the public needed the full facts about the workings and legacy of the Shërbimi Informativ i Kosovës, or SHIK.

Krasniqi said an inquiry would also handle claims that other political parties had their own secret services.

The SHIK emerged from the ranks of the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, following the end of the war with Serbia in 1999, and then became the intelligence arm of the now ruling Democratic Party of Kosovo, PDK.

The secret service is widely believed to have eliminated political rivals to the PDK during 2000 and 2001, though this was not proven in court.

Two alleged former SHIK agents, Nazim Bllaca, a self-proclaimed hit-man and Naim Miftari, an investigator, have already confessed their roles in the service.

Krasniqi has asked other MPs to sign his initiative and so force parliament to shed light on the way that SHIK functioned and who financed it.

By law he needs at least 40 signatures to table the initiative to the legislature, which will then formalize the commission.

“We need to find out what the structures and the hierarchy of this service were, who financed it, how much people were paid, and what they did with the money," he said.

"Did it compile files and for whom did it compile these dossiers? These are the most important elementary questions for the people and state of Kosovo,” Krasniqi added.

The former head of SHIK, Kadri Veseli, in a TV appearance in 2009, said that different businesses financed the SHIK and denied any links to political murders. SHIK claimed in June 2008 that it had officially disbanded.

But a US expert on Albanian issues, David Phillips, released a report back in 2010 on the agency, quoting an anonymous source claiming that the supposedly defunct body was still receiving $200 million a year from bribery, extortion, racketeering, and protection services.

The report by the former senior advisor at the US State Department’s Bureau for European Affairs has since been published by the National Committee on American Foreign Policy.

Krasniqi, a former gunrunner and fundraiser for the KLA, who was then living in New York, has been widely fingered as the source of the information.

OWS Documentary: "History of an Occupation"

March 30 2012

Race, Gender, and Occupy
By Sweta Vohra and Jordan Flaherty, Fault Lines
A version of this article originally appeared on the Al Jazeera website

At a recent panel discussion on the Occupy movement, a left-leaning professor from New York University speculated that identity politics – the prioritizing of issues of race and gender in movements for justice – could be a plot funded by the CIA to undermine activism. While most commentators do not go this far, the idea that activists who focus on these issues are “undermining the struggle” has a long history within progressive organizing. And in Occupy Wall Street encampments around the country these debates have often exploded into public view.

For the past six months, we have been following the Occupy movement for a two-part documentary on Occupy for Fault Lines. We have spent weeks in conversation with activists as they have planned actions and struggled to keep their movement relevant through a cold winter. And organizers have told us repeatedly that they feel these discussions around race and gender, far from weakening the movement, have lent it strength and made organizing more accountable to the communities most affected by the economic crisis.

The process of challenging structural oppression has been difficult. We spoke to many women and people of color who felt pushed out of Occupy. Some activists, already bruised by dismissive media coverage, tried not to let these conflicts show. When internal conflicts would arise they tried to not let it happen on camera. But what we did observe are many fiercely intelligent activists dedicated to waging these struggles within Occupy and strengthening the movement with their work.

The 99 per cent

When people gathered in Zuccotti Park on September 17, the anger at corporate greed was a unifying call. This was a protest that in large part was about shifting power from the wealthy to the many. It was a mostly white crowd, but it sought to incorporate a wide range of voices.

The economic crisis in the US had made the white middle class question their future. Soaring unemployment rates, suffocating student loan debt, and thousands of foreclosures began to close in. This reality propelled the Occupy movement forward. And many feel that the presence of so many relatively privileged white people brought increased media attention and public sympathy.

Organizers told us they immediately saw the next step as needing to raise awareness among the many young people new to activism that came flocking to occupations. “It’s the job of the social justice movement to continue that conversation,” says Max Rameau, a co-founder of Take Back the Land, who has advised many of the Occupies.

He told us that occupiers need to “make sure this isn’t just a movement of the way white people have gone from being able to every day shop at particular malls, and now they have to shop at reduced, discount stores … this has to do, really, about inequality and long-term inequality, including communities who have suffered for years, not just because of the recent economic downturn.”

Many women reported harassment in the camp, and even assault – especially those that stayed overnight. “I think there were some (Occupy camps) that allowed homophobia and sexism to thrive in a really significant way,” says Rameau. “I think homophobia and sexism in society exist everywhere, but were allowed to thrive in some of these areas.”

Manissa Maharawal, a PhD student and Occupy activist, said: “I love the discourse of the 99 per cent. I think it’s great, I think it’s been really unifying. But I would like it to go along with saying something like: ‘We are the 99 per cent, but the way that we experience the 99 per cent can be very different’.”

Jack Bryson, a 49-year-old Black public service worker, became an activist after his sons witnessed the killing of their friend Oscar Grant at the hands of transit police in Oakland. When he heard that Occupy Oakland had named their camp Oscar Grant Plaza, he came to check it out. He was excited by what he found, but also thought many young white activists he met had a lot to learn about poverty and repression. “The black community, for 400 years, [have] always been the 99 per cent,” Bryson said. “Welcome to our world.”

Bryson was one of many who told us that Occupy activists needed to understand the ways in which communities of color experience the criminal justice system. He noted that Occupy Oakland had faced intense police repression. But, he told us, what many failed to realize was that police brutality is a daily fact of life in many communities. “Black, young men … would love to come out here. But what happens here, with the police? It happens on Saturday nights to Black young men leaving a nightclub, or a black young man going into a gas station and being followed by the police.”

Boots Riley, a hip-hop artist and Occupy Oakland organizer, told us that he hopes the Occupy movement can challenge the ways that people have viewed policing. “I think that what happens normally is the media has most of white America looking at people of color as deficient, savage, and when they see something happen to them by police they believe that it was somehow their fault,” says Riley. “Our ideas and views about the police are very tied in to our ideas and views about why people are poor.”

If OWS wanted to be a movement that was going to shift power in the US, these organizers felt it had to come to terms with the fundamental differences in the ways that communities of color experienced racism, how women experienced patriarchy, and how queer and transgender communities experienced homophobia and gender bias. If Occupy Wall Street wanted to talk about envisioning an alternative community, activists would first have to face their own privilege.

That awareness has involved active engagement by white anti-racists, as well as the activists of color who committed deeply to the movement, despite often facing attacks for bringing up issues of race and gender.

“I was totally impressed by the leadership that was coming from young people of color, young women of color,” activist and scholar Angela Davis told us in a conversation about Occupy camps she visited on the East coast.

“I think it’s good that there’s some white men getting involved, but they also have to recognize that, in order to be involved in this campaign of the 99 per cent against the one per cent, we have to recognize that the 99 per cent is hierarchically developed by itself.”

Davis told us that Occupy was indebted to a long history of direct action led by women and by people of color. She specifically noted the legacy of resistance in prisons, led by those behind bars. “Let’s recognize that we’re not artificially imposing these issues on the Occupy movement,” added Davis. “The Occupy movement has organically risen from those movements.”

For Lisa Fithian, one of many white activists who seeks to challenge race and gender bias in the movement, this consciousness raising is a crucial part of struggling for justice.”What I teach is that those with more privileges whether because your color of your skin, your gender, your education, whatever, how do you use those privileges strategically to raise those of all?”

“We have to take our privileges, become conscious and use them to actively change the social relationships, and access, and availability of resources,” she added.

Blocking the process

Manissa Maharawal, a South Asian woman, has been one of Occupy Wall Street’s most eloquent and passionate defenders. But she almost walked out of the movement on one of her very first visits to Zuccotti Park. When she, along with several people of color, stood up in front of hundreds of people to block a proposal at a very early Occupy Wall Street assembly, she felt anger and hostility from many of those present. She says it’s “still one of the more intimidating things that I’ve had to do in my life”. The proposal was for a document called the Declaration of the Occupation, and she felt language in the document erased oppression faced by people of color.

She did not want to have to block the proposal and face the angry stares of hundreds of people. However, says Maharawal, it’s something she had to do. “What struck me then was that if I want Occupy to be something that’s around for a long time in my life … it needs from the very beginning to be a movement that’s taking these things on,” she explained. “And that is thinking about not just corporate greed and financial institutions, but is thinking about how these things are connected to racism, to patriarchy, to oppression generally.”

Ultimately, Maharawal and others who agreed with her succeeded in changing the language of the declaration. Nearly two months later, one of the white male activists who had expressed his frustration with her came up to her to thank her for her intervention. “I’m really glad you did that, I learned a lot right then,” he told her.

“Making these connections is difficult, it’s been like constant work in this movement,” says Maharawal. But, she adds, “this stuff doesn’t feel like minutia, it feels fundamental to me”. She says this movement is about creating a real alternative to our current system, and, for her, that means fighting these systemic issues. “Why are we going to create a system that just re-creates all these oppressions? That recreates racism, that recreates oppression, that recreates gender hierarchy. Why would I want to be a part of that?”

Sweta Vohra and Jordan Flaherty are producers of Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines. Fault Lines presents two special programs on the Occupy movement premiering March 20 & 27.

Russia halves Ukraine gas shipments

Map showing Russian natural gas pipelines.

Πηγή: EUobserver
By AFP
March 30 2012

(MOSCOW) - Gazprom said on Friday it had recently halved Russia's natural gas shipments to Europe through Ukraine as part of efforts to reduce deliveries through the troublesome transit nation.

The Russian monopoly said it had reduced its deliveries across the former Soviet republic by 47 percent in recent days and denied Ukrainian claims that the drop was dictated by falling demand in Europe.

"This is only the beginning," Gazprom spokesman Sergei Kupriyanov said in a statement.

"We are at the start of a long journey aimed at diverting gas transits from Ukraine to our (Belarus) subsidiary Beltransgaz and our new subsea pipelines," the Gazprom spokesman said.

The deputy head of Ukraine's oil firm Naftogaz had earlier said that daily shipments through his company's transport network had dropped to 180-200 million cubic metres of gas from 400 million cubic metres earlier in the week.

"This is probably because Europe does not currently need such high volumes," Naftogaz deputy chief Vadim Chuprun was quoted as saying by Interfax news agency.

Russia has twice halted gas deliveries to Europe across Ukraine in the last six years over its neighbour's outstanding debts and refusal to agree to higher gas prices.

Ukraine on both occasions accused Russia of using gas as a weapon to pressure its government to adopt more pro-Moscow policies.

Kiev is now trying to rework a January 2009 agreement whose signing led to the eventual conviction and imprisonment of Ukraine's former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko for abuse of power.

Russia has offered to renegotiate the 10-year deal in exchange for control of Ukraine's pipeline network -- an offer that Kiev rejects.

The Russian firm last year launched the Nord Stream natural gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea and is now also sending more gas through Belarus after winning full control of that ex-Soviet nation's pipeline network.

Mossad Cutting Back on Covert Operations Inside Iran, Officials Say

Iranians hold a portrait of assassinated nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan during his funeral after the Friday prayers outside Tehran university on January 13, 2012.

Πηγή: Time
By KARL VICK
March 30 2012

Israel’s intelligence services have scaled back covert operations inside Iran, ratcheting down by “dozens of percent” in recent months secret efforts to disable or delay the enemy state’s nuclear program, senior Israeli security officials tell TIME. The reduction runs across a wide spectrum of operations, cutting back not only alleged high-profile missions such as assassinations and detonations at Iranian missile bases, but also efforts to gather firsthand on-the-ground intelligence and recruit spies inside the Iranian program, according to the officials.

The new hesitancy has caused “increasing dissatisfaction” inside Mossad, Israel’s overseas spy agency, says one official. Another senior security officer attributes the reluctance to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who the official describes as worried of the consequences of a covert operation being discovered or going awry. Netanyahu was Prime Minister in 1997 when a Mossad attempt to assassinate senior Hamas official Khaled Meshaal in Amman Jordan ended in fiasco. Two Mossad operatives were captured after applying a poison to Meshaal’s skin, and returned to Israel only after Netanyahu ordered the release of the antidote. The Prime Minister also was forced to release Hamas’ spiritual leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin from an Israeli prison, dramatically boosting the fortunes of the religious militant movement.

“Bibi is traumatized from the Meshaal incident,” the official says. “He is afraid of another failure, that something will blow up in his face.”

Iranian intelligence already has cracked one cell trained and equipped by Mossad, Western intelligence officials earlier confirmed to TIME. The detailed confession on Iranian state television last year by Majid Jamali Fashid for the January 2010 assassination by motorcycle bomb of nuclear scientist Massoud Ali Mohmmadi was genuine, those officials said, blaming a third country for exposing the cell.

In that case, the public damage to Israel was circumscribed by the limits of Iran’s credibility: Officials in Tehran routinely blame setbacks of all stripes on the “Zionists” and “global arrogance,” their labels for Israel and the United States. But that could change if the Islamic Republic produced a captured Israeli national or other direct evidence – something on the lines of the closed circuit video footage and false passports that recorded the presence of Mossad agents in the Dubai hotel where Hamas arms runner Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was found dead in his room in January 2010. Difficult-to-deny evidence of Israeli involvement trickled out for weeks; Netanyahu was Prime Minister then as well.

The stakes are higher now. With the Iranian issue at the forefront of the international agenda, a similar embarrassment could undo the impressive global front Washington has assembled against the mullahs — perhaps by allowing Iran to cast itself as victim, or simply by recasting the nuclear issue itself, from one of overarching global concern into a contest confined to a pair of longtime enemies.

Some warn that the assassinations already run that risk. After the most recent killing, of nuclear scientist Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan in January, the United States “categorically” denied involvement in the death and issued a condemnation. Western intelligence officials say he was at least the third Iranian scientist killed by Mossad operatives, who lately are running short of new targets, according to Israeli officials.

“It undercuts the consensus, the international consensus on sanctions,” says Mark Fitzpatrick, a former State Department nuclear proliferation specialist who opposes the assassinations.

The covert campaign also invites retribution from Iran’s own far-reaching underground. In the space of just days last month, alleged Iranian plots against Israeli targets in Thailand, Azerbaijan, Singapore and Georgia were announced as thwarted, and Indian officials blamed Iran for a nearly fatal attack that went forward in New Delhi. The wife of an Israeli diplomat was injured by a magnetic bomb attached to her car by a passing motorcyclist, the precise method Israeli agents are alleged to have used repeatedly on the crowded streets of Tehran.

But scaling back covert operations against Iran also carries costs, especially as Iran hurries to disperse its centrifuges, some into facilities deep underground. Quoting an intelligence finding, one Israeli official says Iran itself estimates that sabotage to date has set back its centrifuge program by two full years. The computer virus known as Stuxnet — a joint effort by intelligence services in Israel and a European nation, Western intelligence officials say — is only the best known of a series of efforts to slow the Iranian program, dating back years. That alleged effort involves a variety of governments besides Israel, involving equipment made to purposely malfunction after being tampered with before it physically entered Iran. The resulting setbacks prompted Iran to announce it would manufacture all components of its nuclear program itself – something outside experts are highly skeptical Tehran has the ability to actually do.

“Iran has said for some time that they’re self-sufficient, but that’s a bag of wind,” says Fitzpatrick, now at London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies. For example, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad in February announced that Iran had perfected a far more efficient centrifuge — a “fourth-generation” machine, three levels beyond its original centrifuges, made from designs purchased from Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan. Fitzpatrick has his doubts. “They haven’t been able to get the second generation to work over the last ten years,” he says.

The alternative is importing equipment, which leaves the product vulnerable to continued tampering — especially in the shadowy markets of front companies where Iran has been forced by U.S. and international sanctions to do much of its business. It can be almost impossible to know whom you’re actually doing business with, a circumstance that favors Western intelligence agencies.

“The easiest way to sabotage is to introduce faulty parts into the inventory from abroad,” says Fitzpatrick.

Between assassination and silent sabotage lies another covert option: Very loud sabotage. Recent years have brought a series of mysterious explosions at complexes associated with Iran’s nuclear program. TIME has reported Western sources saying that Israel was responsible for the massive November blast at a Revolutionary Guard missile base outside Tehran, which by dumb luck also claimed the life of the godfather of Iran’s missile program.

But other blasts remain genuine mysteries. Weeks after a huge explosion darkened the sky over a uranium enrichment site in Isfahan, in central Iran, Israeli officials appeared eager to see what had actually happened. “I’m not sure what,” a retired senor intelligence official said two weeks afterward, then offered an analysis based on open-source satellite photos available to anyone with an internet connection.

With Libya's Ascendant Islamists: 'Don't Get the Wrong Idea'

Abdel Hakim al-Hassadi, once an Islamist exile from Gaddafi's Libya who spent years fighting on the side of the Taliban in Afghanistan, greets guests in his living room in the eastern Libyan city of Darna

Πηγή: Time
By ABIGAIL HAUSLOHNER
March 30 2012

Abdel Hakim al-Hassadi seems unperturbed by the fact that someone blew up his car last night. "I was at evening prayer in the mosque when it happened," he says. An unknown assailant threw a grenade under the car, sending it into flames. "I believe it was a message," he adds. "If they wanted to kill me — they would do it in an open place." Then he offers his guests tea.

In post-Gaddafi Libya, where a weak, fledgling government means little security and a lot of uncertainty, life is still a little dicey. But to al-Hassadi, perhaps the most powerful man in the eastern Libyan city of Darnah, it's all part and parcel of moving forward, past the era of dictatorship and into something freer, and hopefully better. "After decades of destruction, it's impossible to change in a few hours or even a few years," he says. "But now we are free. Even the land has changed — it's growing new grass again."

Al-Hassadi, 46, was the commander of the Abu Slim Martyrs Brigade, which fought on the eastern front line against forces loyal to the late Muammar Gaddafi during Libya's war last year. It was Darnah's biggest brigade, and al-Hassadi says that most of the local fighters still view him as their leader.

But al-Hassadi also gets a significant chunk of his street credit from the fact that he fought in Afghanistan, on the side of the Taliban, from 1997 to 2002. "I was fighting against the Northern Alliance and Karzai," he says, before adding quickly: "I didn't fight the Americans."

In the new Libya, new types of characters are emerging from the ashes of Gaddafi's decades-long repression to take the reins in a new, yet-to-be-determined kind of society. And in some cases, old stereotypes and predictions seem to be holding true. Liberal elites from the country's larger cities of Tripoli and Benghazi have long cracked jokes about Darnah's repute as a hotbed of extremism. And Salem el-Naas, a manager at the town's only luxury hotel, the Darna Pearl Hotel, laughs heartily when asked whether any tourists ever come to the sun-drenched city on the sea. "Tourists or terrorists?" he chuckles before regaining his composure. "Not yet," he adds more seriously. "But we hope."

Suffice it to say that despite its rolling hillsides of tamarind trees and sleepy, whitewashed apartments, Darnah has a bad rep — one that al-Hassadi embodies perfectly. When Gaddafi's heir apparent, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, warned at the start of the uprising last year that the east wanted to break off and form an Islamic emirate, most people assumed he was talking about Darnah. The town's residents boast that they sent more men to fight in the insurgency during the Iraq war than any other city in Libya. (Recently, several dozen people held a protest to demand that their captured relatives in Iraq be returned.) And a wall along the azure Mediterranean coast has been graffitied with warm and tolerant slogans like "Yes to Pluralism. No to Extremism" and "No to Qaeda" — but the words "No to" have been crossed out.

The fact that Darnah's most powerful man in the post-Gaddafi era happens to be a former associate of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of al-Qaeda, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the assassinated leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, doesn't do a whole lot to void the stereotype. And it makes some of the country's liberals downright nervous. "I met Zawahiri and Zarqawi. But Sheik Osama [bin Laden] — well, I was in the same house, but I never met him," al-Hassadi recalls as one of his young sons plays nearby in an Afghan-style pakul hat.

Indeed, al-Hassadi is the kind of community leader and fighter who, in unluckier circumstances 10 years ago, might have wound up at the U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo Bay. But these are different times. The Islamists whom Gaddafi worked hard to keep under lock or underground are among the key architects of a new Libya — another, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, whom al-Hassadi says he admires and whom the CIA and MI6 allegedly helped extradite to Libya for torture by Gaddafi's regime, is one of the most powerful military leaders in Tripoli. And al-Hassadi will tell you that's not as bad as it might sound. "The West thinks that everyone who has gone to Afghanistan is a terrorist," he says, looking sharply at me: "Have you ever been to Afghanistan?"

What matters now, he says, is that he and the other prominent religious and revolutionary leaders of Darnah are trying to restore stability. "We're trying to build a police service here," he says. And indeed, the residents there say their town is one of the safest in eastern Libya. And after decades of neglect under Gaddafi, they're seeing a revolving procession of top government figures. "In the last two weeks, all the government ministers were here — even [head of the NTC] Mustafa Abdel-Jalil," says el-Naas at the Darna Pearl Hotel. "They have to visit Darnah because Gaddafi and his family didn't like it, so the new government has to come here to have a better view of the city. They have to correct the old governmental view."

In streets lined by palms, school is back in session and uniformed boys and girls flock from sidewalks into courtyards. Teachers say they're following a new curriculum. But for all of Darnah's religiosity, the religious-studies portion hasn't changed, only the subject of history, which used to include Gaddafi's propaganda-rich study of the Jamahiriya (his contortion of the Arabic word for republic), says Ruqaya al-Azraiq, an administrator at a girls' secondary school in the town.

To some extent, al-Hassadi concedes, it's true what the outsiders say, that Darnah is a religious place. "People here are very concerned with religion and the Arab world," he says — that's what drove many of its young men to join the insurgency in Iraq to fight the "injustice" wrought by the Americans, he says. Those who have returned home do want a Libya that is governed by Islamic law, he says. But he argues that some people misunderstand what that means. "Islam is built on values like public service, mercy, freedom of expression and human rights. There is no law in the world that can protect the rights of women and human beings like Islam," he says. "But there have been some mistakes that have given the West the wrong idea."

Darnah marked the heartland of Libya's first armed uprising against Gaddafi in the 1980s and '90s, says Mansour Kikhia, a population geographer at Benghazi University. And Gaddafi's neglect of the area had only served to feed the flames of extremism and revolt, he adds, which in turn spurred a harsher crackdown. "That's what made some of Darnah's youth grow sympathetic towards [the Islamists]," he says. In the end, fear of Darnah's reputation for extremism became a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Al-Hassadi says he went to Afghanistan initially because he, like many other Islamists living under North Africa's dictatorships at the time, was fleeing state repression. "We went to Sudan, to Syria, to Egypt. But they followed us everywhere. Europe was impossible to get into. So you had to go to Afghanistan. It was controlled by the Taliban, so it was the safest place for us."

Al-Hassadi won't say whether he wants to see a Taliban-styled regime in Libya — exactly what liberals in Tripoli and Benghazi say they fear as they watch the rise of figures like him. But he also says it's too soon to know what Libya's future government will look like. "I'm not for or against the Taliban. Our religion is one of forgiveness and one that gives people their rights. Anyone who steals is punished, and he who kills gets killed — this is what Islam teaches, and even that [value] is something they teach in America." He smiles.

It's almost time for the noon prayer, and as we are to leave a living room adorned with vases of fake flowers and silver tea trays, al-Hassadi apologizes for not shaking my hand (it's not appropriate). Then he jokes: if we lose his phone number and need to contact him in the future, we can always get it from the CIA. "Italian intelligence, the CIA — everyone is still watching us," he says with a grin and then shrugs indifferently. They probably are.

EU foreign policy chief may boycott Syria meeting in Turkey over Cyprus

Πηγή: Panarmenian Net
March 30 2012

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton is mulling whether to boycott the Friends of Syria meeting on April 1 in Istanbul due to Turkey’s refusal to invite Greek Cyprus to the key meeting, Hürriyet Daily News reported.

“Ashton is unlikely to be in Istanbul due to Ankara’s decision,” an EU diplomat told the HDN. “Instead, her deputy, Pierre Vimont, will represent the European External Action Service.”

Ashton’s office said they were not in a position to confirm that she would be in Istanbul on April 1.

According to diplomatic sources, Ashton tried hard to convince Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu to secure Greek Cyprus’ participation in the meeting alongside other EU countries, but she could not obtain a positive response in their last phone conversation March 27.

The diplomat said talks between Ankara and Brussels that aimed to change the other’s mind were continuing, but there was little room for each side to back down from their positions.

Polish PM promises truth on CIA interrogations of al-Qaeda suspects

Πηγή: Panarmenian Net
March 30 2012

Poland's prime minister has promised to get to the truth behind claims that his country was involved in secret CIA interrogations of al-Qaeda suspects, BBC News reported.

Donald Tusk was reacting to revelations that Poland's former intelligence chief has been charged over the affair. Poland has always officially denied having any involvement with the interrogations.

Among those thought to have been held in Poland is the man who claims to have masterminded the 9/11 attacks. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was arrested in Pakistan in 2003, now faces trial at a US military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay.

In 2006 a report for the Council of Europe accused 14 member states, including the UK and Germany, of colluding in more than 1,000 CIA rendition flights across European territory.

Polish campaigners have published official records of several CIA planes, five of which were known to be carrying passengers, landing in 2002 and 2003 at Szymany, a Polish military base in the north-east. It is claimed that the secret jail was located nearby in Kiejkuty. Polish prosecutors launched an investigation into the claims in 2008.

Newspaper reports earlier this week revealed that the former head of Poland's intelligence services, Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, has now been charged with setting up secret prisons.

Mr Tusk said that "No-one, whether in Poland or on the other side of the Atlantic, should have a shadow of a doubt that this affair will be resolved. Poland will never again be a country where politicians, even if they are working hand-in-hand with the world's most powerful country, can make under-the-table deals," Mr Tusk said. "We're not living in the 19th Century, or in some bantustan, and those who are in government must act entirely in line with their conscience and the law, both Polish and international," he added.

But he also cautioned those investigating the case should "must rise to the highest standards of concern for state interest" and show the "utmost discretion".

The U.S. has not denied that it flew prisoners across the world, though it insists it never authorized the use of torture.

Report: US Drone Attacks Escalate in Yemen

As many as 104 civillians killed as a result of US drones in Yemen, report finds

Πηγή: Common Dreams
March 29 2012

The United States has significantly ramped up drone attacks in Yemen in the last year, according to a report done by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. The report concludes that drone attacks "against alleged militants in Yemen have risen steeply during the Arab spring, and are currently at the same level as the CIA’s controversial drone campaign" in Pakistan.

"At least 26 US military and CIA strikes involving cruise missiles, aircraft, drones or naval bombardments have taken place in the volatile Gulf nation to date, killing hundreds of alleged militants linked to the regional al Qaeda franchise," the report concluded. "But at least 54 civilians have died too, the study found."

There have been as many as 34 drone attacks in Yemen since May of 2011, the report said, which is more than the total number of drone attacks in the country going back 10 years. In total, a range of 275 – 516 have been killed by the attacks, and between 54 -104 of them have been civillians.

All but one of the strikes have taken place under President Obama, who has taken a personal interest in the Yemen campaign. By the time he came to office al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) had grown to become, in his words, ‘a network of violence and terror’ that had attracted a number of US citizens to its cause, including radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.

AQAP even began publishing online propaganda magazines in English, and was behind a number of attempted terrorist attacks against the US, the UK and their allies.

With the CIA heavily engaged in Iraq and Pakistan, the job of crushing AQAP was handed to the Pentagon’s elite Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) – the same unit that had captured Saddam Hussein and would later kill Osama bin Laden.

But from the start, JSOC’s operations were mired in controversy.

Acting on intelligence that an AQAP meeting was taking place in the southern Yemen desert on December 17 2009, JSOC launched at least one cruise missile loaded with cluster bombs at the gathering. A Yemen parliamentary commission later found that 14 alleged militants died in the attack. But so too did 44 civilians.

US drone raids in Yemen 'kill hundreds' (Al Jazeera English):

Dozens killed in Libya violence

Πηγή: FT
By Borzou Daragahi
March 29 2012

Dozens have been killed in violence between communities in the past several days in southern Libya, underscoring the country’s volatility after the downfall of Colonel Muammer Gaddafi.

Official media reported by late Wednesday that more than 50 people had been killed and 150 injured in clashes between rival armed groups in the main southern city of Sabha, which lies 170km from Libya’s Murzuk oilfields.

By Thursday, officials and a witness said, calm had been restored, with the government dispatching nearly 3,000 troops by land and air to re-establish order. A meeting of tribal elders had also helped to restore calm.

“Now the situation is quiet,” said Fadi Esmali, a freelance journalist in Sabha, reached by telephone. “I can hear the air force planes overhead bringing in more soldiers.”

The causes of the clashes, which pitted Arabs against Tabu tribesman, were murky. Some reports cited a dispute over a motor vehicle that spiralled out of control. But Mr Esmali said the violence had deeper roots in tensions between the two communities.

The Tabu, with ties to neighbouring Chad, had threatened to break away from Libya over perceived discrimination by the country’s new leaders. “If the need arises, we will demand international intervention and seek to establish a state like South Sudan,” Issa Abdul Majid Mansour, leader of the Tabu Salvation Front, declared on Wednesday, according to the English-language Libya Herald.

The Tabu were also subject to forced evictions and travel restrictions under Gaddafi. But many Libyans who supported the 2011 revolutionary war suspect them of having supported the former regime. Gaddafi imported hundreds of mercenaries from sub-Saharan Africa to help to quell the uprising.

However, Mr Esmali said the latest tensions had in fact arisen over how 5m Libyan dinars ($4m) in funds recently allocated by the interim National Transitional Council would be distributed among various constituencies in Sabha. “They fight for money, not for any other reason,” he said.

Many worry tensions could flare up again. Both sides in the fight are holding captives.

Report: NATO shares blame over Libya migrant boat deaths

Πηγή: Local10
By Laura Smith-Spark (CNN)
March 29 2012

A catalog of failures by NATO and European coastguard and naval forces led to the deaths of 63 people fleeing the conflict in Libya by sea last March, a damning Council of Europe report said Thursday.

Vessels in the area failed to respond to distress calls, and a "vacuum of responsibility" meant no one assumed a duty to help the stricken boat as it drifted in the Mediterranean Sea, the report said.

As a result, only 9 of the 72 migrants who boarded the boat in Tripoli survived the 15-day voyage at sea. The boat eventually drifted back to the Libyan coast with a handful of survivors.

Italian search and rescue authorities, NATO, naval vessels in the area, the Libyan authorities and reckless smugglers are among those who share responsibility for the deaths, the report said.

It also highlights that this case is only one of many, with at least 1,500 lives lost last year as migrant boats tried to cross the Mediterranean.

Authored by Dutch lawmaker Tineke Strik and adopted by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on Thursday, the report is due to be debated by the assembly next month.

Called "Lives lost in the Mediterranean Sea: who is responsible?" it highlights gaps in the maritime legal framework and the failure of NATO and the nations involved in the Libya conflict to plan adequately for an exodus of refugees and asylum seekers.

In the case of the boat from Libya, the report pieces together what happened from credible witness testimony and other evidence.

The passengers, migrants from Sub-Saharan Africa who included 50 men, 20 women and 2 babies, were led to the small, rubber boat by Libyan militia members. Smugglers then removed much of the food and water on board to cram more people in.

After more than 18 hours at sea, with fuel and supplies running short and no land in sight, the boat's captain called a priest, who contacted the Italian maritime rescue service, which in turn alerted boats in the area, the report said.

"No one went to the aid of this boat, despite a distress call logged by the Italian Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre, which pinpointed the boat's position," the report said.

"There were also a number of alleged direct contacts between the boat in distress and other vessels, including a helicopter that dropped biscuits and water, but never returned, two fishing vessels, both of which refused to provide assistance, and a large military vessel which came into close contact with the boat, but ignored obvious distress signals."

When the boat finally washed back ashore, the 10 people left alive were imprisoned. One later died after failing to receive medical care, the report said.

The report makes a series of recommendations to prevent future tragedies of this kind, adding: "In this case, many opportunities for saving the lives of the persons on board the boat were lost."

One recommendation is to ensure that European nations "fill the vacuum of responsibility" if the relevant authorities, in this case Libya, do not fulfill their search and rescue obligations off their shores, the report said.

Another is to ensure that there are clear guidelines on what constitutes a distress signal and a vessel in distress.

The report also recommends taking measures to tackle the issue of commercial vessels not wanting to help migrant boats out of fear of being caught up in criminal activities, losing out financially or falling foul of an ongoing dispute between Italy and Malta over where the refugees are taken.

NATO and its member states should also investigate why their vessels failed to respond, the report said.

The Council of Europe is an international organization bringing together 47 countries. It seeks to "create a common democratic and legal area throughout the whole of the continent," according to its mission statement.

The members of the Parliamentary Assembly are appointed by the parliaments of each member state.

IMF's man in Greece under fire over minimum wage cuts

Πηγή: Citywire
By Emily Blewett
March 29 2012

A (largely Greek) audience challenged the IMF mission chief Poul Thomson on the extent of the austerity measures in Greece at a panel debate at the London School of Economics last night.

In response to a question on increased suicide rates in Greece since the austerity measures, Thomson said he found the figures ‘alarming’ but reiterated that Greece’s minimum wage must be cut by at least 22%.

This, he argued would stop the jobless, who make up 40% of the population, being outpriced of the labour market.

Also on the panel was Moritz Kraemer, head analyst of EMEA credit ratings at Standard & Poor’s. His team, he said, had cut their rating on the country’s debt since the second private sector haircut as they expected further debt restructuring.

‘Greece hasn’t avoided default,’ said Kraemer. ‘Whether you want to call it a voluntary default or not, Greece has defaulted in that holders will not receive their full payment.’

Greece’s 110 billion euro bailout from the European Commission and the European Union, is the largest received by any country ever said Thomson.

Yet head economist at FTI Economics and co-panelist, Vicky Pryce, said Greece needed further ‘sweeteners’ alongside the IMF restructuring reforms.

‘Greeks like conspiracy theories,’ said Pryce. ‘There is the idea in Greece that some countries want to take Greek assets cheaply.’

Kraemer said rising populist sentiment, together with tax evasion and unemployment, was a major factor barring economic growth prospects in Greece.

None of the panelists advocated a Greek exit from the eurozone as not only would a return to the Drachma wipe out all of Greek savings and bankrupt companies, it would also make Greece's return to the debt market even more difficult than under the Troika programme.

Protestors greeted the IMF’s head of the Greek restructuring process at the university with the words ‘Paul Thomson get out, we don’t want your bailout!

Cyprus and Israel lay plans for subsea power link

1000km of submarine power line in three sections would connect Israel to Greece

Πηγή: IET
By Lorna Sharpe
March 29 2012

Work to lay an underwater electricity cable between Israel and Cyprus could begin as early as next year, as the first step in a much more ambitious project to create a connection to the European mainland.
The 2,000MW link would end the energy isolation of both nations, enabling them to buy electricity from each other to help balance supply and demand.

The company behind the project, DEI-Quantum Energy, signed a memorandum of understanding with Israel Electricity Corp. on 4 March to carry out a feasibility study into the proposals.

Assuming the study’s conclusions are favourable, work could start in 2013 and be completed three years later.

The Israel-Cyprus link alone is expected to cost EUR500 million (£420m).

If completed, the entire EuroAsia Interconnector will stretch for 1000km (540 nautical miles) between Israel, Cyprus, the Greek island of Crete and mainland Greece at depths of up to 2000m, making it the most ambitious project of its kind, according to DEI-Quantum Energy chairman Nasos Ktorides.

All the participating countries would benefit, according to Ktorides.

“Greece will increase its energy efficiency, and become a significant player in the European energy chess-board,” he said.

“Cyprus will cease being an island and supply a steady flow of energy in and out of the country, and Israel will become a major energy provider to the European continent.”

Cyprus suffered a serious loss of generation capacity in July 2011 when a huge explosion at a military base put the island’s principal power plant out of action.

The European Investment Bank has just agreed to lend EUR130 million to the Electricity Authority of Cyprus for a new production unit at the Vasilikos plant.

Both Israel and Cyprus have discovered deposits of natural gas in the eastern Mediterranean, opening up the possibility of generating electricity for export in future.

DEI-Quantum Energy is a partnership between Greece’s public power corporation DEI, Cypriot power-sector investor Quantum Energy and Bank of Cyprus.

With the Focus on Syria, Mexico Burns

On the U.S.-Mexico border, drug-related violence rivals immigration as a media fixation, projecting images of a so-called “failed state” and a “wave” of killings.

Πηγή: Stratfor
By Robert D. Kaplan
March 28 2012

While the foreign policy elite in Washington focuses on the 8,000 deaths in a conflict in Syria -- half a world away from the United States -- more than 47,000 people have died in drug-related violence since 2006 in Mexico. A deeply troubled state as well as a demographic and economic giant on the United States' southern border, Mexico will affect America's destiny in coming decades more than any state or combination of states in the Middle East. Indeed, Mexico may constitute the world's seventh-largest economy in the near future.

Certainly, while the Mexican violence is largely criminal, Syria is a more clear-cut moral issue, enhanced by its own strategic consequences. A calcified authoritarian regime in Damascus is stamping out dissent with guns and artillery barrages. Moreover, regime change in Syria, which the rebels demand, could deliver a pivotal blow to Iranian influence in the Middle East, an event that would be the best news to U.S. interests in the region in years or even decades.

Nevertheless, the Syrian rebels are divided and hold no territory, and the toppling of pro-Iranian dictator Bashar al Assad might conceivably bring to power an austere Sunni regime equally averse to U.S. interests -- if not lead to sectarian chaos. In other words, all military intervention scenarios in Syria are fraught with extreme risk. Precisely for that reason, that the U.S. foreign policy elite has continued for months to feverishly debate Syria, and in many cases advocate armed intervention, while utterly ignoring the vaster panorama of violence next door in Mexico, speaks volumes about Washington's own obsessions and interests, which are not always aligned with the country's geopolitical interests.

Syria matters and matters momentously to U.S. interests, but Mexico ultimately matters more, so one would think that there would be at least some degree of parity in the amount written on these subjects. I am not demanding a switch in news coverage from one country to the other, just a bit more balance. Of course, it is easy for pundits to have a fervently interventionist view on Syria precisely because it is so far away, whereas miscalculation in Mexico on America's part would carry far greater consequences. For example, what if the Mexican drug cartels took revenge on San Diego? Thus, one might even argue that the very noise in the media about Syria, coupled with the relative silence about Mexico, is proof that it is the latter issue that actually is too sensitive for loose talk.

It may also be that cartel-wracked Mexico -- at some rude subconscious level -- connotes for East Coast elites a south of the border, 7-Eleven store culture, reminiscent of the crime movie "Traffic," that holds no allure to people focused on ancient civilizations across the ocean. The concerns of Europe and the Middle East certainly seem closer to New York and Washington than does the southwestern United States. Indeed, Latin American bureaus and studies departments simply lack the cache of Middle East and Asian ones in government and universities. Yet, the fate of Mexico is the hinge on which the United States' cultural and demographic future rests.

U.S. foreign policy emanates from the domestic condition of its society, and nothing will affect its society more than the dramatic movement of Latin history northward. By 2050, as much as a third of the American population could be Hispanic. Mexico and Central America constitute a growing demographic and economic powerhouse with which the United States has an inextricable relationship. In recent years Mexico's economic growth has outpaced that of its northern neighbor. Mexico's population of 111 million plus Central America's of more than 40 million equates to half the population of the United States.

Because of the North American Free Trade Agreement, 85 percent of Mexico's exports go to the United States, even as half of Central America's trade is with the United States. While the median age of Americans is nearly 37, demonstrating the aging tendency of the U.S. population, the median age in Mexico is 25, and in Central America it is much lower (20 in Guatemala and Honduras, for example). In part because of young workers moving northward, the destiny of the United States could be north-south, rather than the east-west, sea-to-shining-sea of continental and patriotic myth. (This will be amplified by the scheduled 2014 widening of the Panama Canal, which will open the Greater Caribbean Basin to megaships from East Asia, leading to the further development of Gulf of Mexico port cities in the United States, from Texas to Florida.)

Since 1940, Mexico's population has increased more than five-fold. Between 1970 and 1995 it nearly doubled. Between 1985 and 2000 it rose by more than a third. Mexico's population is now more than a third that of the United States and growing at a faster rate. And it is northern Mexico that is crucial. That most of the drug-related homicides in this current wave of violence that so much dwarfs Syria's have occurred in only six of Mexico's 32 states, mostly in the north, is a key indicator of how northern Mexico is being distinguished from the rest of the country (though the violence in the city of Veracruz and the regions of Michoacan and Guerrero is also notable). If the military-led offensive to crush the drug cartels launched by conservative President Felipe Calderon falters, as it seems to be doing, and Mexico City goes back to cutting deals with the cartels, then the capital may in a functional sense lose even further control of the north, with concrete implications for the southwestern United States.

One might argue that with massive border controls, a functional and vibrantly nationalist United States can coexist with a dysfunctional and somewhat chaotic northern Mexico. But that is mainly true in the short run. Looking deeper into the 21st century, as Arnold Toynbee notes in A Study of History (1946), a border between a highly developed society and a less highly developed one will not attain an equilibrium but will advance in the more backward society's favor. Thus, helping to stabilize Mexico -- as limited as the United States' options may be, given the complexity and sensitivity of the relationship -- is a more urgent national interest than stabilizing societies in the Greater Middle East. If Mexico ever does reach coherent First World status, then it will become less of a threat, and the healthy melding of the two societies will quicken to the benefit of both.

Today, helping to thwart drug cartels in rugged and remote terrain in the vicinity of the Mexican frontier and reaching southward from Ciudad Juarez (across the border from El Paso, Texas) means a limited role for the U.S. military and other agencies -- working, of course, in full cooperation with the Mexican authorities. (Predator and Global Hawk drones fly deep over Mexico searching for drug production facilities.) But the legal framework for cooperation with Mexico remains problematic in some cases because of strict interpretation of 19th century posse comitatus laws on the U.S. side. While the United States has spent hundreds of billions of dollars to affect historical outcomes in Eurasia, its leaders and foreign policy mandarins are somewhat passive about what is happening to a country with which the United States shares a long land border, that verges on partial chaos in some of its northern sections, and whose population is close to double that of Iraq and Afghanistan combined.

Mexico, in addition to the obvious challenge of China as a rising great power, will help write the American story in the 21st century. Mexico will partly determine what kind of society America will become, and what exactly will be its demographic and geographic character, especially in the Southwest. The U.S. relationship with China will matter more than any other individual bilateral relationship in terms of determining the United States' place in the world, especially in the economically crucial Pacific. If policymakers in Washington calculate U.S. interests properly regarding those two critical countries, then the United States will have power to spare so that its elites can continue to focus on serious moral questions in places that matter less.

What Putin Means for Washington

Image: osipovva

Πηγή: National Interest
By Jeffrey Mankoff
March 14 2012

Washington had four years with the young, agreeable Dmitri Medvedev as its principal Russian interlocutor. But last week’s election confirmed that soon U.S. diplomats will once again be dealing directly with Vladimir Putin. What does Putin’s return mean for Russian foreign policy, and how should Washington adjust its own approach now that Putin, rather than Medvedev, will be sitting across the table?

Despite some nasty rhetoric directed at the United States during the campaign and the tensions that overtook U.S.-Russian relations at the end of Putin’s first stint in the Kremlin, Washington has an opportunity to maintain good, mutually beneficial relations with Moscow during Putin’s second act. The key will be developing an agenda that focuses on shared interests and seeks to move beyond the current deadlock over issues such as missile defense and Russia’s domestic politics. With the United States accelerating the drawdown of its forces from Afghanistan ahead of 2014, focusing on regional security in Afghanistan and central Asia would be a good place to start.

In Putin’s Shoes

Despite some fairly ferocious anti-American rhetoric during the preelection campaign, Putin remains someone with whom Washington can do business. Though Putin avoided day-to-day involvement in foreign policy over the past four years, his role as the stronger partner in Russia’s tandem government meant that Medvedev could rarely make decisions at odds with Putin’s preferences. For instance, the U.S.-Russia “reset,” proclaimed by presidents Medvedev and Obama in early 2009, could not have come about without Putin’s assent. Other key decisions also required the prime minister’s approval, including the tightening of sanctions on Iran at the UN in June 2010 and Russia’s decision to permit the transit of cargo across its territory via the Northern Distribution Network (NDN), a web of supply routes to Afghanistan that allows the United States to avoid Pakistan.

The harshness of Putin’s preelection rhetoric should not obscure his longstanding recognition that good relations with the United States are in Russia’s national interest, as long as Washington is prepared to treat Moscow as an equal partner—something Washington, in Putin’s view, has often failed to do. In a long article published in Moskovskie Novosti on February 27, Putin reiterated that “we are prepared to make great strides in our relations with the U.S. to achieve a qualitative breakthrough, but on the condition that the Americans are guided by the principles of equal and mutually respectful partnership.”

Western analysis of Putin’s Moskovskie Novosti piece has focused on its criticism of the United States, which Putin accused of “undermining our security and upsetting global stability”—for instance by intervening militarily in Libya and threatening to do the same in Syria and Iran. Putin has long chafed at what he views as the West’s lack of respect for Russia’s interests and standing as a major power. In this telling, Moscow has made significant concessions over the past twelve years: accepting U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and the Baltic states’ inclusion in NATO, tolerating U.S. military deployments in central Asia, and sacrificing Russian financial and strategic interests in Iran in pursuit of a united front against Tehran’s nuclear program. Yet Washington continues to demand more while brushing aside Moscow’s own interests, which require respect for the supremacy of the UN Security Council on issues of war and peace, the preservation of strategic stability in the nuclear field and, above all, respect for Russia’s leading role inside the former Soviet Union.

Putin’s article and his preelection statements offer the United States a choice: cooperation based on mutual respect or zero-sum competition. Faced with an increasingly volatile Middle East, a weakened European Union and the challenges of executing a strategic pivot to Asia, the United States needs generally productive relations with Russia—which in turn means pursuing precisely the kind of cooperation Putin suggests.

A New Agenda

One of the biggest problems is the lack of a positive agenda for cooperation. The big agenda items of the past few years have largely been achieved: the New START agreement, tightened UN sanctions on Iran, Russia’s WTO admission, reduced competition in the post-Soviet region. Greater economic cooperation is in both countries’ interests. But apart from convincing Congress to grant Russia permanent normal-trade relations status, new economic arrangements are long-term process. Greater transparency leading to direct cooperation on missile defense, which has been the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s efforts to build a more collaborative security relationship, appears stuck.

Where Washington and Moscow have a real need to collaborate in the shorter term is Afghanistan and its central-Asian neighborhood. While Moscow was long wary of Washington’s courtship of the central-Asian governments in connection with the U.S. deployment to Afghanistan, Putin and other Russian leaders have realized that the fight against the Taliban—of which the U.S. role in central Asia is a piece—helps shield Russia from the spread of radicalism and criminality. Along with several of its neighbors, Russia is a critical partner in the NDN. After long opposing the U.S. presence in the region, Russia is now calling on the United States to reconsider its 2014 deadline for withdrawing from Afghanistan.

The Obama administration is unlikely to extend the deadline, but it should begin an intensive dialogue with the Russians about regional security during and after the withdrawal. Moscow has already agreed to establish a transit hub inside Russia (in Ulyanovsk) for use during the withdrawal. Going forward, Russia’s biggest concerns will center on stemming the flow of Afghan narcotics into Russia and ensuring the security of the secular regimes in central Asia. The United States also has an interest in preventing central Asia from becoming a source of radicalism and instability, but with the withdrawal from Afghanistan, will be less able to shape events. Precisely for that reason, Washington ought to work with Moscow to develop a framework for regional security after 2014. Areas to emphasize include border security, training and supplying of security forces, counternarcotics and regional economic development, where Russia should have a strong role. Given the absence of a real, positive agenda for U.S.-Russian cooperation, focusing on central-Asian security offers an opportunity to move beyond counterproductive standoffs over missile defense and the Middle East that have dominated bilateral relations for too long.

U.S. policy makers should be clear-eyed about cooperation with Putin’s Russia. Cooperation will not be based on shared values, but on the pursuit of common interests where they exist, coupled with frank disagreement elsewhere—including on Russia’s internal development. Putin’s reelection was clearly flawed, but he can nevertheless plausibly claim to have the support of a majority of Russians, even if his supporters number somewhat less than the 63.6 percent of votes he officially received. The relatively small size of the post-election protests only serves to emphasize that, contrary to many predictions in the West, Putin’s hold on power remains secure, at least for now. That could change, of course, and in unpredictable ways. For that reason, Washington should focus specifically on areas like central-Asian security, where cooperation will be in Moscow’s interest regardless of domestic developments in Russia.

U.S. officials should maintain contacts with the opposition and openly acknowledge the flaws in Russia’s electoral process. But the United States needs to work with the Russian government it has, not the one it would like to have. That’s why U.S.-Russian relations require a shared agenda for cooperation, regardless of who is sitting across the table.

Jeffrey Mankoff is an adjunct fellow with the CSIS Russia and Eurasia Program and a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York City. He was a 2010–2011 Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow based in the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs at the U.S. Department of State.

China pitches for setting up of development bank for BRICS

Πηγή: The Indian Express
March 28 2012

A day ahead of the BRICS Summit, China today pitched for setting up of a development bank on the lines of global financial institutions, which would exclusively provide funds at low cost to the five emerging countries, including India.

Yu Ping, Vice Chairman of China Council of Promotion for International Trade, who is the part of Chinese delegation here, said the meeting of the BRICS Business Forum today recommended the setting up of the development bank for furthering trade activities among the member-countries.

Heads of states and governments of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa are meeting here tomorrow to discuss a host of issues in the backdrop of global economic slowdown.

"The delegates recommended that the five BRICS countries have lot of business opportunities and for the companies to engage in cooperation and have business activities they need financing services. Therefore, there should be an institutional guarantee for financial services," Yu said.

"So, the delegates put forward the idea of establishing a development bank to finance the business activity," he said.

Asked whether China is hopeful of a formal announcement of setting of the multi-lateral lending institution being strongly pushed by Chinese government, he said they have high expectations.

"We have a high expectation for establishment of the development bank... If it is announced, it will be a big news for us. That is our common expectation," Yu said.

The proposal for a new development bank is one of the many issues to be deliberated by the five fast-growing economies when their leaders meet for their fourth summit.

Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa account for 45 per cent of the world's population and a quarter of economy at USD 13.5 trillion.

It is to be noted that BRICS agreed to "strengthen financial cooperation" among their individual development banks at the Leaders Summit at Sanya in 2011.

For furthering this objective, the Forum recommended exploring the possibility of establishment and operational modalities of financial institutions such as a Development Bank and or an Investment Fund that can assist in the development of BRICS and other developing countries.

Besides, the BRICS member-nations would sign two agreements relating with line of credit (LoC) and letter of credit tomorrow.

"Local currency line of credit (LoC) facility among the member-banks and the other one is the letter of credit information facility," Chairman of Board of Directors of China Development Bank Chen Yuan said.

"The first one would facilitate member banks to extend lines of credit to each other and the the second one is the letter of credit facility is that one member bank can issue letter of credit to be confirmed by another member bank of BRICS," Chen said.

Member banks include Export-Import Bank of India, Brazil's BNDES, China Development Bank, Russia's state development bank Vnesheconom bank and the Development Bank of South Africa.

On China's proposal for carrying out trade in local currencies among the five member-countries, Yu said more exchanges of views will be required to arrive at a conclusion on the issue.

Yu said delegates have recommended simplification of visa procedure, better market access and reform in taxation. On skewed trade surplus in its favour in bilateral trade with India, Yu said the Chinese government had been expanding import from India and encouraging companies to also import more from Indian manufacturers.

India has been expressing concern over ballooning trade surplus in China's favour which piled up to USD 27.07 billion in 2011 even though Indian exports to the neighbouring country went up to USD 23.4 billion. India has long been pushing for market access for Indian pharmaceutical and IT companies.

The bilateral trade volume between India and China was USD 73.9 billion.

PM Borisov: Belene NPP Cannot Spoil Bulgaria-Russia Relations

Prime Minister Boyko Borisov has said that the Belene NPP is no reason to spoil the traditionally good relations between Bulgaria and Russia.

Πηγή: novinite
March 28 2012

Commenting on the decision to quit the Belene NPP project, Prime Minister Boyko Borisov has voiced hopes that Bulgaria and Russia will retain friendly relations.

"I hope that President Putin will stick to his word and that we will part ways as friends on this project," Borisov stated after a hearing in Parliament on Wednesday.

He added that he had told Putin on the phone that "it is not like us to cop out on one project for years on end and to spoil our relations with this."

Borisov explained that Energy Minister Delyan Dobrev would fly to Moscow on Friday to "find a friendly way to withdraw from the project."

The Prime Minister reminded that Russia and Bulgaria were enjoying a good partnership on the South Stream gas pipeline project.

Borisov officially confirmed Bulgaria's plans to suspend the project for the construction of a second nuclear power plant and provided the motives for the decision.

He specified that the decision was final.

His words did not make it clear whether the move would have financial repercussions.

Borisov said that it was not worth it to erode the good relations between Bulgaria and Russia over the Belene NPP project.

He added that the Belene NPP was located in an earthquake-prone area near a fault line.

The Prime Minister also mentioned the financial drawbacks to the project, emphasizing that Bulgaria had to pay an additional EUR 140 M for the already assembled reactor.

"We cannot afford to pay for it, and there is no way we can make future generations pay," Borisov declared.

He explained that Delyan Dobrev had been tasked with opening negotiations for the launch of a procedure for building a seventh unit at the Kozloduy NPP with the new reactor.

He went on to say that the decommissioning of Unit 1 of the Kozloduy NPP would free up a site, meaning that an eight unit could be built there.

Borisov argued that the transfer of the paid-for and assembled reactor to theKozloduy NPP would take seven years.

"It is an old generation reactor because that's what they bought. We paid for it and we'd better get it. The specialists can seek options, if there are candidates to buy it, we could sell it," the Prime Minister snapped.

Borisov's comments did not specify whether the GERB government was planning to build a 7th unit at the Kozloduy NPP or whether it would put up the reactor for sale.

According to unofficial information cited by news portal dnevnik.bg, the government will make an attempt to sell the reactor first and if the offer fails to attract a buyer, the facility will be taken to Kozloduy.

Arab League summit in Iraq discusses Annan’s Syria peace plan

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari (R) supported Kofi Annan’s plan on Syria at the Arab summit in Baghdad. 

Πηγή: Al Arabiya News
March 28 2012

Arab foreign ministers discussed a draft resolution calling on Syria’s government to hold talks with the opposition and to end the violence in the country as they met at an Arab League summit in Baghdad on Wednesday.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari at the summit said it is better for Kofi Annan’s plan on Syria to succeed rather than the conflict become highlighted again at the United Nations Security Council.

The plan by U.N.-Arab League’s special envoy Kofi Annan stipulates that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad pull his troops and heavy weapons from cities before peace talks with his opponents.

A continuing Syrian army offensive is part of the regime’s efforts to overrun rebel strongholds as it tries to crush an unprecedented year-long revolt, which according to the U.N. has claimed the lives of more than 9,000 people.

“We cannot be neutral towards the daily killings in Syria,” Zebari told Arab officials at the summit.

“The Baghdad summit comes as an important step in light of the [recent] changes in the [Arab] region,” he added.

The Arab League suspended Syria last year and has in the past called on Assad to step aside to allow talks. But members are split over how to handle increasing violence that threatens to inflame the region’s complex ethnic and sectarian mix.

‘Saddam Hussein’s palace’

Meanwhile, U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon said Wednesday that Kuwait’s emir will attend the Arab summit in Iraq, hailing progress in ties and urging Baghdad to fulfill obligations for its 1990 invasion of the emirate.

Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah is to attend the summit on Thursday in Baghdad, in the first visit by a Kuwaiti head of state since Saddam Hussein’s invasion of August 1990, Ban said following talks in Kuwait City.

“This conference is being held in the palace of Saddam Hussein, where plans for the invasion of Kuwait were made,” Zebari said in a political reference to Kuwait.

“I urge Iraq to fulfill its longstanding obligations to Kuwait ... especially in regards with the missing people, Kuwaiti property, compensation” and maintenance of border marks between the two nations, Ban said.

The U.N. chief welcomed the “progress in the normalization of relations between Iraq and Kuwait,” adding that the visit of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to Kuwait earlier this month was a positive step.

Earlier, Ban and Sheikh Sabah held talks on the crisis in Syria, relations with Iraq and the Arab summit, the U.N. chief told a press conference in the Kuwaiti capital on his way to also attending the summit.

Exclusive: Key players in upcoming Iran nuclear talks have different expectations

Πηγή: foxnews
By Greg Palkot
March 28 2012


EXCLUSIVE: Iran and the international community are getting ready for a new round of talks next month aimed at resolving questions surrounding the Islamic Republic’s suspected nuclear program.

In exclusive interviews with two of the main players in the dispute, Fox News learned firsthand of the hardened differences that remain on this potentially life-and-death matter.

Exclusive interview with one of Iran's top nuclear negotiators


Yukiya Amano, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N.’s Vienna-based nuclear watchdog, says he thinks Iran at the very least is preparing for the possibility of building a nuclear bomb.

“We have information that indicates Iran was engaged in activities relevant to the development of nuclear explosive devices,” Amano told Fox News.

But Iran’s longtime ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Asghar Soltanieh, denies this, telling Fox News that Iran “…has not been pursuing a nuclear weapon” and that his country’s nuclear program is aimed only at “peaceful purposes.”

Soltanieh said Iran “will never, ever suspend our activities, including enrichment” of uranium, which is demanded in U.N. Security Council resolutions and is expected to be on the table in next month’s talks.

The possible weaponization of Iran’s nuclear program will be another key talking point in negotiations. Amano raised questions about Iran’s Parchin military facility, where a high explosive chamber allegedly exists and has been used to test a detonation device for a nuclear bomb.

The IAEA was refused access to the Parchin facility during a visit to Iran last month.

“We would like to go there and examine if that is the case or not,” Amano said.

Soltanieh claimed Iran was prepared to let the IAEA visit the site until the matter became “politicized.” Still, he didn’t sound too welcoming when he referred to the IAEA’s visit to Parchin in 2005.

“We cannot permit each time any country wants to knock at the door and wants to go to our military sites,” he said.

Soltanieh denied that ever-tightening and crippling international sanctions are forcing Iran closer to making concessions.

“Sanctions have had no effect,” he said. “We are more determined to pursue our nuclear activities.”

And he brushed off the growing threat of an Israeli attack on nuclear sites in Iran, saying, “Nobody would dare attack Iran.”

If Israel did attack, he said ominously, there would be “…a strong response with an ‘iron fist.’”

Amano rejected accusations that he has been overstating the Iranian nuclear threat and that -- unlike his predecessor, Mohammed el-Baradei -- he favors the United States.

“What I do inevitably has political implications, but it doesn’t mean we put political considerations first,” he said. “It should be the opposite; technical considerations should come first.”

And as Iran and the West continue to squabble over the details of next month’s talks, the former Japanese diplomat is careful to warn that the two sides may still be far from a breakthrough.

“It will take time,” he said. “This is a complicated issue with a long history.”

Soltanieh said there’s “a window of opportunity” to resolve the issues, but he hinted it could be on Iran’s terms.

“If you tell the Iranian people you ‘must’ do something, the answer is ‘no’ in a loud voice,” he said. “If you ask Iranians to ‘please’ do something, you will see flexibility and concession.”

The coming weeks could indicate how “polite” both sides plan to be about this possibly lethal issue.